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Digital Audio Insider is David Harrell's blog about the economics of music and other digital content. I write from
the perspective of a musican who has self-released four albums with the indie rock band the Layaways.

My
personal website has links to my LinkedIn and Google+ pages and you can send e-mail to david [at] thelayaways [dot] com.

Some more Q1 2009 eMusic downloads showed up in our CD Baby account yesterday. But instead of the 30.5 cent rate I wrote about last week, we received either 17.8 or 19.7 cents per track for this second batch of downloads.

CD Baby just confirmed that these smaller payouts were for our non-U.S. eMusic sales. After accounting for CD Baby's 9% commission, eMusic paid out the following rates for Q1 2009:

This isn't, however, an apples-to-apples comparison. For the U.S., eMusic doesn't withhold mechanical royalties from its payouts to labels and self-released artists. That is, the 33.5 cent payout includes the mechanical royalty for each download, and labels are responsible for paying the music publishers/composers of each track. (My band hasn't recorded any non-original material, so I skip this step.) But outside of the U.S., eMusic makes a separate payment to Buma/Stemra for the mechanical royalty for each download.

I'm not sure what statutory mechanical royalty rates are outside of the U.S., but assuming they are similar to the current 9.1 cent base rate in the U.S., adding that amount to the label payout amount gets you fairly close to the U.S. payout rate. (I'm hoping the mechanical portion for our non-U.S. eMusic sales will eventually make its way to me via BMI.)

There is, though, another element to consider: eMusic subscription prices are more expensive outside of the U.S. This comparison is a couple years old, but it's probably safe to say there's still a premium for subscribers outside the U.S. And -- as explained in last week's post -- digital breakage by subscribers boosts the per-track amount eMusic pays to labels for each download.

So if the payout rates are fairly similar, despite the differences in subscription prices, the best explanation I can think of, assuming the same revenue sharing percentage, is that -- on average -- non-U.S. eMusic subscribers are less likely to let their downloads expire.